I'll be on in a bit. I figured out a way to get my mic working without having to go out and buy a new sound card so I'm piecing things back together. Got my NZXT 1000W Hale in today too, that makes me feel better. Also, people need to start using the teamspeak more... I'l put it in my sig.

just played on the PC.... At first it was on auto settings of high and personally I dont think it looked much better than the x360 other then it had AA & AF. Then changed the settings to Ultra.... WOW... Now i wish all the Caspian Border servers weren't full

twitter.com/zh1nt0: "The update we ran now is posted in Battlelog. Check the News section "

Fixes include (from #3):

• Fix for the "Your active soldier is not ready for duty" problem newly registered users have been seeing
• More updates to the filter handling in the Server Browser, default servers now have even more available slots
• Fix for Battle reports listing in Profiles

Fixes include (from #2):

• Allowed Pending EA-ID accounts on the site
• Minor tweaks and updates to the Stats pages based on reports from the Forums
• Improved copy on the Origin friends import screen
• Minor tweaks to the Party and join system

Battlefield 3 benchmarksBattlefield 3 Beta: 18 Radeon and Geforce cards + SLI & Crossfire benchmarkedBattlefield 3 is going to raise the bar in terms of graphical quality. Since you can't create something out of nothing, the game demands very fast graphics cards. Time for an upgrade? We've done comprehensive benchmarking to give you answers.

The system requirements for the Battlefield 3 beta are high. For pleasing gameplay EA and DICE recommend a quad-core CPU accompanied by a recent graphics card with 1 GiB video memory. Always keep in mind that the beta does not represent the maxium image quality of the full game – nevertheless it's running slow.

Battlefield 3 Beta: Test scene
Our test is simple: We're starting at the city, running down the bank near the water for 20 seconds (logged by Fraps). This scene on the Metro map sports a wide view distance, particle effects and, as a result of the sprint, streaming. Indoors the frame rates are about 30 to 50 percent higher. Since we're using the latest drivers from AMD and Nvidia, the Catalyst 11.10 Preview and Geforce 285.38, these results are state-of-the-art.

Remarkable: Nvidia's drivers give their cards an edge over the competition. The Geforce GTX 570 outperforms the similar-priced Radeon HD 6970 by nine percent, even though the AMD card runs faster in our overall benchmark index. Upcoming drivers from AMD and Nvidia will push the framerates by time and maybe change the current placing.

It was an exciting day at PC Perspective yesterday with much our time dedicated to finding, installing and playing the new Battlefield 3 public beta. Released on the morning of the 26th to those of you who had pre-ordered BF3 on Origin or those of you who had purchased Medal of Honor prior to July 26th, getting the beta a couple of days early should give those of you with more FPS talent than me a leg up once the open beta starts on Thursday the 29th.

My purpose in playing Battlefield 3 yesterday was purely scientific, of course. We wanted to test a handful of cards from both AMD and NVIDIA to see how the beta performed. With all of the talk about needing to upgrade your system and the relatively high recommended system requirements, there is a lot of worry that just about anyone without a current generation GPU is going to need to shell out some cash.

Is that a justified claim? While we didn't have time yet to test EVERY card we have at the office we did put some of the more recent high end, mid-range and lower cost GPUs to the test.

Before I jump into the results, I thought I would just take a quick moment to describe the way Battlefield 3 works on the PC as it is quite different than what you might be used to with other PC games. Rather than just launching the game, you first have to launch Origin, which is essentially EA's take on the Valve Steam client. Yes, I am one of those people that desperately wanted EA to just adopt the Steam platform so we could have "one to rule them all", but giant companies like this just don't do that. So Origin it is. After opening it and logging in, then selecting the BF3 Beta, rather than starting the game you actually get a browser opened up:

The entire server browser, friends list, group creation and more actually launches from your default web browser rather than the Origin client or even the BF3 game itself. And since we saw disabled buttons for co-op and for single player selections I am guessing that even when this game is released on October 25th, this interface will remain.

The controls aren't really THAT bad and in some ways it is nice to be able to look for servers to join while still having other windows open and being able to do or check on other tasks besides Battlefield 3. The server list doesn't update as often as I would like so you never know if you are trying to join a server that has become full since the list originally loaded but most of my first day of testing was done hitting that magical "quick match" button.

Initially, the BF3 game loads in a window and that happened in ALL CASES for me. EA tells you in several places that the shortcut to go full screen is "ALT + ENTER" and in my case only the left ALT button actually did that. Other than that minor nuisance, the game loaded up pretty well.
Our Testing Process and Headaches

Testing a multiplayer game is hard and is made even more so by the fact that you cannot create your own servers to control who joins, etc. This left me running around on seemingly random servers (since getting on the same server twice seemed nearly impossible) trying not to die during my many 120 second FRAPS runs. Because of this, keeping an exact path and process for our benchmarking testing was impossible and instead we mitigated that issue by playing it for MANY sets of benchmarking results for each card and in each setting. We then had to manually look at the results and find which were the "average" while kicking out those that had especially high or especially low scores.

For the most part, we were able to get fairly consistent benchmark runs though at the expense of whatever team happened to be saddled with me. (Sorry Internet!) Here you can see a set of three results from the outdoor section of the Metro map on the GTX 580 with Ultra quality settings:

So even though there was some variance that is pretty much impossible to avoid in a large multiplayer game like this, my methods did result in good repeatability.

As I mentioned above, all of our testing was done on the "Operation Metro" map as it was the only one publicly available on the first day of the beta. Rumors are circulating that soon the second map will open with 64 player support and vehicles so we are going to keep an eye on that for sure and see if performance is drastically affected.

There were two sections of the Metro map though that had very different performance characteristics and thus we tested them independently. Of three main areas on the map, the first starts in a larger outdoor area, the second takes place inside tunnels of a subway while the third returns outside in a more cityscape style design. My testing differentiated between the first outdoor section as being the most GPU intensive while the indoor section was much easier on the graphics card. You will see results for both map areas on the following pages.

Also, just to get as many different cards in as we could with the limited amount of time in a day, we ran all of our testing at 1920x1200 resolution and at Ultra quality settings.

We will start with performance testing between our NVIDIA and AMD cards on the next page and then take a quick look at image quality comparisons between NVIDIA and AMD following that.

Our test setup included a Core i7-965 Nehalem processor, 6GB of DDR3 memory and a 600GB VelociRaptor hard drive. We used the latest drivers from both NVIDIA and AMD that were released specifically yesterday for Battlefield 3: 285.38 for NVIDIA and 11.10 Preview for AMD.

Starting today, we are happy to invite all players to the Battlefield 3 Open Beta! You can find the download instructions for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC below. For PlayStation 3 users in North America, expect the Open Beta to be downloadable later today, once Sony completes their weekly update.

Played on the Operation Métro map in Rush mode that won us Best Action Game and Best Multiplayer Game at E3, this is your chance to experience one of many flavors of Battlefield 3.

Make sure to head to our free social platform Battlelog to check your in-depth stats progression, start your own Platoon, and see how your friends are doing in the news feed. To get you started on the Operation Métro map, here are some playing tips straight from us at DICE. Enjoy, and let us know what you think!

We would also like to invite you to leave any feedback to us at DICE via the forums in the social platform Battlelog. Remember that this software is in Beta and does not represent final quality. For a full FAQ on the Open Beta, head here.

The Open Beta ends on October 10th. Return here for ongoing news, updates, and announcements during the Open Beta period.

DICE’S TOP 10 BATTLEFIELD 3 OPERATION MÉTRO TIPS
1) Stick to your team mates, and remember to spawn on them to stay close to the fight.
2) Use your kit specific abilities to help your team mates. Assault can hand out med kits, Engineers can repair vehicles, and Support can hand out ammo.
3) Make sure when you have armed an M-COM station, that you defend it to make sure it is destroyed.
4) The bombed-out tunnel section in Operation Métro is an excellent place to use a flashlight as one of your weapon attachments. Use it to light the tunnels up – and to blind your enemies.
5) Attach bipods to your weapon and deploy it automatically by pushing up against cover or going prone and zooming in – this gives you a huge increase in accuracy and stability.
6) Use suppressive shooting (fire close to enemies behind cover) to negatively effect the enemy’s fighting capabilities.
7) Watch out for falling debris as this can hurt you. But you can also hurt your enemies by taking out buildings with the Engineer’s RPG.
8) Shotguns are excellent for CQC (Close Quarters Combat) in the tighter tunnels sections.
9) Fire automatic weapons in short bursts for accuracy, or switch to single fire mode if applicable.
10) To grab your enemy’s dog tag as a souvenir, do a stealth knife kill from behind.

To download the Battlefield 3 Open Beta, just follow these instructions:
PlayStation 3 (U.S.)
From storefront, click on View All By Title
Click on B
Click on Battlefield 3
Locate the Battlefield 3 Beta

Xbox 360
The Battlefield 3 Open Beta will be visible in the Xbox Live Marketplace under Demos, or you can go to Xbox.com via this link and add the Open Beta to your Xbox 360 download queue automatically.

PC
If you have already installed our new download service Origin, go to the section “Free games”, where the Battlefield 3 Open Beta will appear for download. You can also head to this product page via the web. If you have not installed Origin yet, it will ask you to do so before proceeding with the download of the Open Beta itself.

twitter.com/zh1nt0: "The terrain deformation on metro. We are working on a fix to implement in the beta as soon as possible #love"

AFAIK, this is the first time they have mentioned fixing a game bug in the beta. I was beginning to think they were just going implement any fixes in the final, in a day-1 patch.

Actually, I don't know the original source, but I have read several people today say it was server specific: "This is cause the server hosts arent properly restarting the maps and your running into holes made from the previous rounds by explosives. Some of the hosts are doing it properly but some arent. (source)"

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Don't remember if someone here had this error, or if it was on another forum:

If you try to install the BF3 Beta and get the error "Download Error: We're sorry, but you do not meet the requirements to download this game" It is probably because of your age. The game is rated Mature/Pegi 18.

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zh1nt0 said:

This issue

Whenever I try to get ingame through the battlelog i keep getting stuck on the joins server window on my browser. I am running my game on w7 64bit after I press join server doesnt matter if its an empty one or one that is almost full it wont let me in at all.

And this is the reply

Thanks for the information everyone, we have been monitoring the servers and have located the problem.
A fix is in the works and will be available as an update to the Battlelog Webplugin during tomorrow morning.

In about 15-20 minutes, we will be rolling out a fix for the server browser that hopefully should keep the player count in better sync.

The site will still be open and fully functional, the only impact is:

- The server browser will be empty for a couple of seconds

- Servers will reappear when something happens and we get an event for them, or when our hourly sync kicks in.
This means that empty servers (= no events) will not be visible in the serverbrowser for up to an hour.
RSPs wanting to get their empty servers back in the browser sooner than that will have to restart them or change map.

Ducky Year of the Snake w/ Cherry MX Browns & Year of the Tiger PBT Keycaps | Razer Deathadder Black

I had that issue as well. I think Battlelog just can't update how many people are in some servers well, so they're actually full, but aren't showing it. Then again, I was only able to find 37 servers on Caspian, so I wasn't able to play it.

right now the game seems to consist only of: find spot to hide, score a few kills, revealed by death cam, repeat
its not like there is any skill or tactics involved so far

Click to expand...

Welcome to Rush. Team 1 needs to get to Point B. Team 2 is at Point B and knows exactly where Team 1 is coming from and fires a wall of bullets at Team 1. Team 1 throws corpses into said wall of bullets until they have to reload. There is some strategy too it, but Rush play mode is just to linear, very hard to flank.

So whats the overall consensus? Is this game going to be EPIC or not? Tell meh!

Click to expand...

Actually like it, sure there's bugs but i think they can iron it out. But im getting tired of Operation Metro, which is odd since i usually like these types of levels. And i actually really like Battlelog, its not as bad as i thought it was gonna be. Simple, quick, just need a better refresh and its good enough for me.